Catherine Guthrie

Articles from Contributor

To any dieter who has ever sworn off bread and pasta, the next sentence may come as no surprise. A new study, published in the Nov.9th issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, shows that after dieting for one year, people following strict, low-carb diets had more bad moods than dieters eating a high-carb (albeit low-fat) diet. And, …

If it seems that you recall particular scents from childhood more vividly than other (more recent) smells, there may be a bona fide biological reason. New research suggests that these “first scents” occupy a privileged place in the brain.

For the study, appearing online in Current Biology, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of …

It’s been a long three weeks for the American Cancer Society. The public relations nightmare that started with an admission to the New York Times that they’d overstated the benefits of detecting many cancers is continuing with new evidence that two of the most reliable screenings—Pap smears for cervical cancer and colonoscopies for …

Childhood obesity rates are through the roof. In the past 30 years, the percentage of overweight kids has nearly tripled in every age group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Obesity in children is defined as a body mass index, BMI, at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex.) The …

Green tea may be considered a little woo-woo by some mainstream cancer experts but the popular beverage continues to creep toward credibility as a weapon against many forms of the disease. The best studies to date hint that green tea may help ward off cancers of the breast and prostate. And this week oral cancer came one step closer to …

Breast cancer surgeons have long wagged their fingers at patients warning them never to lift anything over 15 pounds, especially if lymph nodes were taken during surgery. Well, for any woman with a child (or groceries for that matter) the limitation is annoying at best, disempowering at worst.

People who suffer with a chronic disability or illness may be happier if they give up hope that things will ever improve, suggests a small but intriguing study published in this month’s issue of Health Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association.

Approximately 270,000 of the 10 million cancer survivors alive in the U.S. were diagnosed and treated before they were old enough to buy themselves a drink, according to the National Cancer Institute. Thanks to scientific advances, as many as 80 percent of children treated for cancer go on to live full lives, but the shadow of the …

Downing foods and beverages made with fructose may add to your risk of developing high blood pressure (aka hypertension), according to research presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology. One of the primary sources of fructose in the American diet is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS for short).

A new study casts doubt on the accuracy of self-reported smoking during pregnancy. The study, published last week in the British Medical Journal, involved a random sample of 3,475 pregnant women in Scotland. Researchers compared the women’s self-reported smoking status with results of blood tests that measured the women’s recent nicotine …

If you haven’t had your life-isn’t-fair moment today, here it is: a lack of health insurance might have led or contributed to the deaths of nearly 17,000 hospitalized U.S. children during the past 20 years, according to new research from scientists at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, MD.